The Day Of Judgement Analysis

The Worst Possible Case: Puritans and the Day of Judgement Well into an assured future for the colonists of America, the Great Awakening began around the same time Michael Wigglesworth was born. The revival of religion continued as America’s first best seller, published by Wigglesworth in 1662, a long poem called The Day of Doom. The Day of Doom clearly incorporates the Puritan ideal of self scrutiny, one of the most fundamentally important aspects of their society . This poem depicts the day of judgement in which all humans are evaluated, either going to heaven or hell. The deciding factor of this is whether they received Grace, only discernable by self introspection. The specific portrayals in the poem pushes Puritan ideas by displaying the worst possible case the day of judgement could bring. The Puritans believed that …show more content…
This is less out of a different biblical interpretation, but rather a purposeful exaggeration in order to scare the Puritans into scrutinizing their actions carefully. An example of this in The Day of Doom is when Jesus’s “winged Hosts flie through all coasts, together gathering both good and bad, both quick and dead and all to Judgement bring”(Wigglesworth 61-64) in a judgmental, swift, and merciless manner; by purposely depicting Christ as such a dominant and terrifying figure, the Puritans (and everyone else) are more likely to try their hardest to escape his wrath, namely by discovering that they have been Graced. The depiction of the son of God sending the Israelites to indiscriminately pick up people and send them to the ultimate judge, who can see every person's wrongdoings, where they will ultimately either be sent to serve God or burn in the flames of hell is a powerful motive to find out whether they were Graced or not. The Puritans often played off of fear as a motivation to try as hard as possible to discern whether they had been chosen or